(Appropriate, since he's a musician as well as a teacher, poet, and tech guru.)

Kevin's also done some "line lifting" in the past, as a way to keep a poetic conversation going. So I decided to riff today's haiku back to Kevin by borrowing the last line of his haiku from yesterday for the first line of my haiku today.

12 comments:

Today, a tanka. The rules say 5-7-5-7-7, but Japanese tanka tends to be shorter, 20-25 English syllables long. Some that I've read are not even 5 lines I'm trying to do 5 lines, with 3 longer and 2 shorter. Total syllables in the 20-25 range. I like the shortness of that number. Also, I'm trying to get a "hinge" line in there that moves one image to another. This one...not so much on the hinge line. It's more like just hinge punctuation.

Hi, Carol,This link to a TankaOnline article pretty much sums up my process! Also, there are some superb examples of modern tanka there, in my opinion.

http://www.tankaonline.com/Quick%20Start%20Guide.htm

In my notebook, I often start with an image (like the capsized boat that I remember from the news) and then write/explore that image to find out more.

As I think about it, for me an image usually drives a poem, and a good amount of trust, trust that if I explore an image, I'll begin to understand why it plucked a heart-string. Or, also, trust that if I look closely enough at almost anything, I'll find a striking image!

About Me

I am a fifth grade teacher. I am the author of Reconsidering Read-Aloud (Stenhouse) and I have poems in the Poetry Friday Anthology, the Poetry Friday Anthology for Middle School, the Poetry Friday Anthology for Science, the Poetry Friday Anthology for Celebrations (Pomelo Books), Dear Tomato: An International Crop of Food and Agriculture Poems, National Geographic Books of Nature Poems, The Best of Today's Little Ditty (2014-15 and 2016), Amy Ludwig VanDerwater's Poems are Teachers, National Geographic's The Poetry of US, and IMPERFECT: Poems About Mistakes.